Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2011 - 38

As a result of his research, Breunig has been able to isolate a moment in time when iron and stone implements coexisted. Excavators regularly ﬁnd iron tools only a short distance from Nok stone axes, suggesting they were used in the same communities, maybe even the same households. “When iron ﬁrst develops, it might be too rare or too costly to be wasted on axes or other things that you can make with stone,” he says. “Our hypothesis is that iron tools replaced stone tools only after the technology was developed enough to deliver suﬃcient quantities of iron. The Nok is an almost perfect culture on which to test this assumption.” Breunig’s evidence has also reinforced a view held by most archaeologists that ancient West Africans moved from stone tools directly to iron, without an intervening copper age. That’s a leap that few other parts of the world appear to have made. With the exception of a site in Mauritania known as Grotte aux Chauves-souris, where, starting in 1968, French archaeologists found copper tools and furnaces dating from 800 to 200 b.c., and another in Niger called Cuivre II, excavated by French archaeologists in the 1980s and dating from slightly earlier, researchers have yet to ﬁnd evidence of copper smelting before iron smelting anywhere in West Africa. Its transition from Stone Age to Iron Age has puzzled researchers since Western European and North African cultures moved into iron after ﬁrst smelting copper for a millennium or so (while others, such as those in Peru, made copper for centuries without ever developing iron).“In the sense of a progression of technological periods, with few exceptions, there was not a Copper Age between the Stone and Iron ages in West Africa,” says Tom Fenn, an expert on African metallurgy at the University of Arizona. Iron technology was probably brought across the Sahara by travelers from North Africa, says Rod McIntosh, an African specialist at Yale University. But archaeologists are looking at the possibility that West Africans developed

iron-working technology autonomously, possibly starting with the Nok. Iron technology, and whether it was imported from across the Sahara or developed in West Africa, is currently a red-hot topic in the scholarly community. Skeptics of autonomous development are accused of denigrating the achievements of African technology, whereas believers are accused of lacking hard evidence. “It has become a political debate,” says Breunig. He will not commit to one side of the argument over the other before he excavates more Nok smelters, which he plans to do with a French archaeometallurgist next year. One skeptic is Rüdiger Krause, a European Iron Age expert at Goethe University. “When people see that somebody else has better technology, it moves very fast. And iron knives are much better than stone. You can sharpen them,” he says. “Mobility was very high in the ancient world. From the north coast of Africa to Nigeria is not a great distance for the movement of a new technology.”

ittle is understood about how Nok society ended. Sometime after a.d. 200, the once-thriving Nok population declined, as attested to by a sharp drop in the volume of pottery and terracotta in soil layers corresponding to those years. Overexploitation of natural resources and a heavy reliance on charcoal may have played a role, says Breunig. Even more puzzling is Nok’s legacy to later cultures. Art historians have long seen Nok as an isolated phenomenon, a splendid relic cut oﬀ from the sequence of African art over the next two millennia. Later civilizations in southern Nigeria had advanced metalworking skills and a tradition of naturalistic portraiture, and art historians are looking more closely at what they might owe to Nok. The most celebrated of these later cultures was Ife (pronounced EE-feh), whose people in southwestern Nigeria turned bronze into stunning portrait heads around a.d. 1300. “We would need more research to establish a stylistic Archaeologist Peter Breunig visits the family of a team member near the excavation site. continuum between Nok and Ife,” says Musa Hambolu, research director at Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Abuja.“To do this would require more detailed study of Nok sculptures because, for now, the evidence is very fragmentary.” Bernard Fagg wrestled with this question—where did Nok culture come from, and where did it go? He wrote about the “striking similarities of style and subject matter” between Nok and Ife but acknowledged there was no proof the people of Ife had ever seen Nok terracottas. Now Breunig is trying to solve that riddle. “In the space of 1,000 years, West Africa moved from sedentary farming complexes like Nok to great empires, [such as Ife and Benin],” he says. “No society is completely isolated in time. That’s a story we’re starting to tell.” ■ Roger Atwood is a contributing editor to Archaeology. He currently lives in London.
ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2011

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2011